Anyone who opened their social media feeds or, indeed, any news website over the last weekend would have been greeted with a cavalcade of colours, courtesy of the extraordinary aurora borealis witnessed all over the world.
My friends everywhere – including those in Cayman Brac – were posting pictures; meanwhile, every time I thought I saw a red glow outside, it turned out to be the brake lights on a passing car. It took me back to when my BFF Lynne and I went on a cruise that made a few stops in Iceland on its journey from Copenhagen to Boston, where every night we braved the freezing temperatures on the open top deck to search for that elusive celestial sight. No worry about hypothermia here, of course. Someone’s definitely been cranking up the ol’ oven thermostat for this island over the last month. But I digress…
If you’ve never been to Iceland, I’m here to tell you that it is like nowhere else you’ve ever visited. From the topography to the language, it’s quite the experience.
On our itinerary, the ship was in Reykjavik overnight, so we figured it made sense to rent a car and go exploring at our own pace.
You know how they usually bring out a simple diagram of the car you’re renting so they can mark any existing dings in advance of you taking the keys? In Iceland, the car is sitting under a grid worthy of the Battleship game – they take their dings seriously. For example, the right corner of the back bumper is sitting in square H9, while the left is in C9. The driver’s mirror is in G3, and so on. With lots of off-road opportunities in that country, only certain vehicles, like SUVs, are allowed to take them. Unpaved routes abound, which can send a spray of small rocks flying when wheels roll over them, peppering paintwork from C1 to H9. My credit card covered us for a lot of insurance stuff, but for the first time ever, I bought every last insurance package the agency offered. Essentially, we’d get a free pass for anything short of one of us deliberately smashing the engine with a volcanic rock.
We got a GPS, as the landscape of Iceland was not something I wished to ‘just wing it’; besides, we had to get back to the ship by a certain time, lest it left without us. You had to input the destination names in the local language, which – to my untrained eye – made ancient Egyptian look like a walk in the park. After driving the Golden Circle (a popular tourist tour), it took us nearly 15 minutes to correctly type in the name of the cruise port, as the person who’d written it down had terrible handwriting. I’m not even getting into the comedy of errors that occurred when we tried to fill the car with fuel on a lonely road at an unmanned service station. The automated pump kept barking something at us in Icelandic. Another credit card? Wrong amount? Out of petrol? Not a clue. Thank God a local came by and took over before I tested that comprehensive insurance package with a hammer.
Once we did get our bearings, it was an amazing place to traverse. The waterfalls and geysers were truly breathtaking and, of course, I couldn’t resist pulling over and feeding every horse we saw in fields by the road. We did get to visit the world-famous Blue Lagoon, but as we booked late, we could only get reservations for the last night slot. We lined up, got our locker keys, and were sent to the shower rooms. You are required to shower before entering the lagoon, and there is very little private space in there. It was also fairly chaotic around the lockers, with lots of women jockeying for position so they could get their swimsuits on and get out for as much time in the lagoon as possible. I’ve never been bumped by so much nudity in my life. “Oh, sorry!” I uttered on repeat, as I ungracefully tried to squeeze my way to my destination through a wall of flesh.
Even though we had originally hoped to go there in the day, I think it would be hard to beat the Blue Lagoon at nighttime. We got our complimentary mud masks and cocktails, and just wandered slowly through the steamy, soothing waters. It was sheer bliss.
We had some great times at our stops in Iceland, and made a number of friends on the cruise at the same time. Each evening, we’d get together for drinks to talk about our adventures, then throw on three layers of clothing and head up to that deck to look for the aurora borealis. On the final night, it was blowing an absolute gale and we didn’t get up there until about 1:30am. We all squinted through frosty eyelashes, desperately searching through the clouds for some sign of something… anything.
Just before we were about to give up, one of our new amigos, Bobby, said, “Hey – I think I see green over there.”
Could it be?
Those of us who had not sought shelter already, looked at where he was pointing.
“Maybe… ,” I said. “It does look a little green, yes… ”
Had we actually witnessed the famed aurora borealis? I’ll never really know, because at that moment, it started to rain, and it was time to get inside before the Red Cross had to be called.
So, the moral of the story is: Definitely visit Iceland if you get the chance; it is well worth the trip. But, if you want to see the aurora borealis, maybe the Brac is the place to be.
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